


Wind over the Water, Fire over the Earth

by abby_sass_ettura



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff, M/M, basically just the two of them being in love, right after "Welcome to the Madness"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 17:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10621773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abby_sass_ettura/pseuds/abby_sass_ettura
Summary: "It’s like watching a star fall, Otabek thinks— a kind of powerlessness, a futility, and at the same time a rare, reckless joy."Otabek waits for Yuri after his exhibition skate.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in class because I’m a dumpster fire and also because I watched the “Welcome to the Madness” preview like 34 times in the first day. This is written with “Pash” commentary in mind, revealing that Yuri snuck into a rock club to see Otabek DJ the night before the EX skate to find a new exhibition song (http://silverhairedfairy.tumblr.com/post/159487962067/get-ready-to-die-by-sayo-yamamoto)

When Yuri finishes his exhibition skate, Otabek can’t move.

  
He can’t breathe, can’t even blink. When the music stops and Yuri straightens, Otabek is utterly still— completely frozen to a fixed point, rendered immobile by the sight of Yuri sweeping his jacket up off the ice as he skates towards the gate.

  
Yuri is relentless. He’s a force in motion that remains in motion, like the boulder of Tartarus, crushing down the hill a thousand thousand times despite any futile effort to hold it back. He’s a fire raging long past the point of consumption, smoldering impossibly into the darkness, feeding on air and ashes alone and somehow still burning.

  
Yuri is electric, intangible. He’s a glowing halo around an ancient TV that’s just been turned off, sizzling and circling in the air, still sparking despite the sudden loss of power.

  
He feels unreal. He moves towards Otabek like a dream, and Otabek thinks about having his tonsils out when he was seven, waking up hazy and fever bright, all the colors in the room bleeding together into arctic white and the whirring of the heart monitor stinging against his skin.

Yuri is stepping off the ice, clicking his purple skate guards over the blades. He’s got his jacket slung carelessly over one shoulder. Strips of pale skin glow purple in the exhibition lights through the cut back of his tank top, and Otabek is suddenly aware of the sensation of cold and heat on his face at the same time.

  
There’s a crowd between the break in the backboards and where Otabek is standing, several feet away from the gate where Yuri makes his exit. He watches Yakov Feltsman greet Yuri first, long-suffering creased into the lines of his face. He watches Lilia Baranovskaya struggle not to smile, the corners of her eyes tight with the effort. He watches Nikiforov and Katsuki, wailing like banshees and flailing like puppy dogs, throw themselves all over an increasingly disgruntled Yuri in praise and pride.

  
Otabek watches, and thinks about what it would feel like to be struck by lightning— to have raw energy in its purest form shocking through his skin, to smell static and burning hair while his body overflows with borrowed power. He likes the idea, he thinks. Maybe.

  
Yuri sees him then, eyes blazing as he locks on to Otabek like a beacon, like a lighthouse search beam over dark water. Otabek feels something inside him jerk, a fishhook behind his navel, a pinching feeling. Yuri is mid-glower at a Victor who looks to actually be crying when he catches Otabek’s eyes, and his face shifts, softens, solidifies into something else. Something Otabek can’t decipher.

  
Yuri shrugs off his entourage, moves towards where Otabek is standing. There’s a buzzing in Otabek’s ears, then, like a blood rush but pitched higher, resonating at the back of his head. Yuri moves like a wave, even as he wobbles awkwardly on his guarded skates, hopping side to side as he reaches down to tug them off.

  
The leather pants glint in the light. Otabek reminds himself to breathe.

  
“So?” is the first think out of Yuri’s mouth when he reaches him. It’s more of a demand than a question, but Otabek can see the tightness around his jaw that means Yuri wants something specific. He swallows, tastes metal and the cold.

  
“It was completely you,” is what he settles on, squeezing the words out around a space suddenly full with the way Yuri stares at him. He hopes the sound is normal, or at least that the buzzing in the air masks the catch around the last word.

  
Yuri eyes flash, pleased. He grins at Otabek, chest puffed out and leaning forward slightly into Otabek’s space. The light glints off the gold cross around his neck, a glittering imitation of the gold medal that rests, carefully wrapped, in Yuri’s hotel room.

  
Otabek can smell him this close, sweat and heat and something else that reminds Otabek of riding his motorcycle near the beach. He realizes that he can’t feel his legs. He might as well be floating, tethered in place only by the cocky, expectant set of Yuri’s gaze.

  
“Hell yes,” Yuri says, proud. “Let them try to talk to me about that “Agape” bullshit now.”

  
“Tough talk from someone who just medaled in the “Agape” bullshit.” Otabek isn’t sure where the snark is coming from, but he says a silent prayer of thanks to whatever muscle memory has taken over his speech.

  
Yuri _tsks_ Otabek’s teasing aside easily. “I won because I’m the best,” he returns, confident. “And now everybody knows it. Even stupid katsudon and his zombie coach.” Yuri’s smile is self-satisfied, full and bright.

  
It’s like watching a star fall, Otabek thinks— a kind of powerlessness, a futility, and at the same time a rare, reckless joy. The thrill of stumbling blindly into something you know is too special, too sovereign to be deserved. You know even as you claim it that it’s not yours, but you pin your dreams to it anyways, praying that universe lets it slide just this once.

  
“Thanks for catching them,” Yuri says then, gesturing to the sunglasses Otabek still has clenched in one hand. Otabek blinks, surprised. He’d lost track of his body completely the moment Yuri looked at him. It comes back to him in pieces, the tingling in his fingers first, then the swooping sensation in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, the heat on the tops of his ears.

  
He should hand them back to Yuri now, he thinks, blinking down at the sunglasses again. Except that now that he’s looking at them— expensive, brand-name shades in a silky matte black, held tightly in the leather of his motorcycle glove— he feels like he’s holding the favor of a knight off to a joust, tossed to him like a rose for luck in the last moments before the battle. He looks at Yuri, triumphant, sparking and wild and barely real and somehow overwhelmingly there, and he suddenly, desperately doesn't want to give them back.

  
Yuri doesn’t reach for them. He just smiles, and it’s without the showy edge, now. It’s just Yuri’s smile. The one Otabek knows from the Park Güell. The one Yuri wore backstage at the nightclub last night, sweaty and out of place and thrilled. Otabek feels it in his toes.

  
It occurs to him that he’d be more than happy to do this, just this, forever— mix music for Yuri, hold his sunglasses at the edge of a rink, chase that smile that’s not performance, not attitude, just him.

  
“Thanks for not nailing me in the face,” is what he says instead. That earns him a real laugh, full and pleased, and Otabek breathes in.

  
“Do you—“ Otabek starts, and then tries again “Yuri, I—“, but the words don’t come, and Otabek just stands there, staring at him. At impossible, incalculable Yuri, the boy with the soldier's eyes who fights so hard and so _all the time_ that by sheer force of will he’s risen higher than anyone ever has before, transcendent talent just an aside.

  
Yuri’s smile widens as Otabek stutters into silence. In the strained, buzzing quiet that follows, Yuri steps forward again, almost flush with Otabek’s chest.  
The way Yuri looks at him crackles along his skin. It’s fire and the beat of the club and the feeling of sliding across hardwood floors in your socks. It’s the smell of a fog machine and the thrumming, fluid silence right before a program. It’s every proud moment Otabek had before the age of ten, when emotions were primal enough to be pure, unrelated to anything but themselves.

  
Yuri huffs impatiently through his nose, and then says “Are you going to kiss me, or not?” and Otabek lets a part of himself fall away.

  
He takes too long, apparently, in the half second he uses to process Yuri’s question, because Yuri clicks his tongue and then pushes forward, brushing the silver X on his tank top across the black of Otabek’s jacket like a marker. Like a target.

  
Yuri kisses like he skates. Like he deserves it. Like by virtue of wanting it the most, it’s already his.

  
Otabek kisses him back, and when he settles one hand over Yuri’s hip, he feels like the whole world is cradled in the crease of his palm.

  
When Yuri steps away, it's only because the noise of the rink has swelled to a decibel neither of them want to deal with. Otabek blinks into green eyes and thinks about forest fires and black glass and sticky club floors and the fact that if he moved his hand just a hair to the right he’d feel the skin of Yuri’s back through the slits in his shirt.

  
Yuri just grabs his hand, drags him away from the rink and the noise. They skid to a stop in a hallway, tenuously secluded, and Yuri steps back into Otabek’s arms.

  
Otabek wouldn’t have been able to find words if he tried, so he abandons the effort. He’s happy to pushed and pulled and kissed, generally buffeted around by this unstoppable force forever.

  
Yuri’s eyes flick back and forth over Otabek’s face, and whatever he finds there must be enough, because he leans in close.

  
Otabek tries to brace himself again for the feeling of decimation, of conquest, but at the last moment Yuri stops, inches away.

  
Their noses are almost touching, and Otabek can feel Yuri breathe.

  
“It was you, too, you know,” Yuri says. His voice is impossibly soft.

  
This time, Otabek kisses him first.

**Author's Note:**

> The bit about the socks on the wood floors is inspired by Joe Johnson’s twitter account. Also I spend 100% of my time reading fanfiction but this is the first time in a long time I’ve written any so do with that what you will. Come say hi on my tumblr (even tho its also a trash heap) storytruths.tumblr.com.


End file.
